If Winter Comes Part 47

"'What do you think of that? Ha!' and she chucked the letter over to him, and from what I know of her you can imagine her sitting bolt upright, bridling with virtuous prescience confirmed, watching him, while he read it.

"While he read it.... Sabre said the letter was the most frightfully pathetic doc.u.ment he could ever have imagined. Smudged, he said, and stained and badly expressed as if the writer--this girl--this Effie Bright--was crying and incoherent with distress when she wrote it. And she no doubt was. She said she'd got into terrible trouble. She'd got a little baby. Sabre said it was awful to him the way she kept on in every sentence calling it 'a little baby'--never a child, or just a baby, but always 'a little baby,' 'my little baby.' He said it was awful. She said it was born in December--you remember, old man, it was the previous March she'd got the sack from them--and that she'd been living in lodgings with it, and that now she was well enough to move, and had come to the absolute end of her money, she was being turned out and was at her wits' end with despair and nearly out of her mind to know what to do and all that kind of thing. She said her father wouldn't have anything to do with her, and no one would have anything to do with her--so long as she kept her little baby. That was her plight: no one would have anything to do with her while she had the baby. Her father was willing to take her home, and some kind people had offered to take her into service, and the clergyman where she was had said there were other places he could get her, but only, all of them, if she would give up the baby and put it out to nurse somewhere: and she said, and underlined it about fourteen times, Sabre said, and cried over it so you could hardly read it, she said: 'And, oh, Mrs. Sabre, I can't, I can't, I simply can not give up my little baby.... He's mine,' she said. 'He looks at me, and knows me, and stretches out his tiny little hands to me, and I can't give him up. I can't let my little baby go. Whatever I've done, I'm his mother and he's my little baby and I can't let him go.'

"Sabre said it was awful. I can believe it was. I'd seen the girl, and I'd seen her stooping over her baby (like I told you) and I can well believe awful was the word for it. Poor soul.

"And then she said--I can remember this bit--then she said, 'And so, in my terrible distress, dear Mrs. Sabre, I am throwing myself on your mercy, and begging you, imploring you, for the love of G.o.d to take in me and my little baby and let me work for you and do anything for you and bless you and ask G.o.d's blessing for ever upon you and teach my little baby to pray for you as--' something or other, I forget. And then she said a lot of hysterical things about working her fingers to the bone for Mrs. Sabre, and knowing she was a wicked girl and not fit to be spoken to by any one, and was willing, to sleep in a shed in the garden and never to open her mouth, and all that sort of thing; and all the way through 'my little baby,' 'my little baby.' Sabre said it was awful.

Also she said,--I'm telling you just what Sabre told me, and he told me this bit deliberately, as you might say--also she said that she didn't want to pretend she was more sinned against than sinning, but that if Mrs. Sabre knew the truth she might judge her less harshly and be more willing to help her. Yes, Sabre told me that....

"All right. Well, there was the appeal, 'there was this piteous appeal', as Sabre said, and there was Sabre profoundly touched by it, and there was his wife bridling over it--one up against her husband who'd always stuck up for the girl, d'you see, and about two million up in justification of her own opinion of her. There they were; and then Sabre said, turning the letter over in his hands, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?'

"You can imagine his wife's tone. '_Do_ about it! Do about it! What on earth do you think I'm going to do about it?'

"And Sabre said, 'Well, I think we ought certainly to take the poor creature in.'

"That's what he said; and I can perfectly imagine his face as he said it--all twisted up with the intensity of the struggle he foresaw and with the intensity of his feelings on the subject; and I can perfectly well imagine his wife's face as she heard him, by Jove, I can. She was furious. Absolutely white and speechless with fury; but not speechless long, Sabre said, and I dare bet she wasn't. Sabre said she worked herself up in the most awful way and used language about the girl that cut him like a knife--language like speaking of the baby as 'that brat.'

It made him wince. It would--the sort of chap he is. And he said that the more she railed, the more frightfully he realised the girl's position, up against that sort of thing everywhere she turned.

"He described all that to me and then, so to speak, he stated his case.

He said to me, his face all twisted up with the strain of trying to make some one else see what was so perfectly clear to himself, he said, 'Well, what I say to you, Hapgood, is just precisely what I said to my wife. I felt that the girl had a claim on us. In the first place, she'd turned to us in her abject misery for help and that alone established a claim, even if it had come from an utter stranger. It established a claim because here was a human creature absolutely down and out come to _us_, picking _us_ out from everybody, for succour. d.a.m.n it, you've got to respond. You're picked out. You! One human creature by another human creature. Breathing the same air. Sharing the same mortality.

Responsible to the same G.o.d. You've got to! You can't help yourself.

You're caught. If you hear some one appealing to any one else you can scuttle out of it. Get away. Pa.s.s by on the other side. Square it with your conscience any old how. But when that some one comes to you, you're done, you're fixed. You may hate it. You may loathe and detest the position that's been forced on you. But it's there. You can't get out of it. The same earth as your earth is there at your feet imploring you; and if you've got a grain, a jot of humanity, you must, you must, out of the very flesh and bones of you, respond to that cry of this your brother or your sister made as you yourself are made.

"'Well, Hapgood,' he went on, 'that's one claim the girl had on us, and to my way of thinking it was enough. But she had another, a personal claim. She'd been in our house, in our service; she was our friend; sat with us; eaten with us; talked with us; shared with us; and now, now, turned to us. Good G.o.d, man, was that to be refused? Was that to be denied? Were we going to repudiate that? Were we going to say, "Yes, it's true you were here. You were all very well when you were of use to us; that's all true and admitted; but now you're in trouble and you're no use to us; you're in trouble and no use, and you can get to h.e.l.l out of it." Good G.o.d, were we to say that?'

"You should have seen his face; you should have heard his voice; you should have seen him squirming and twisting in his chair as though this was the very roots of him coming up out of him and hurting him. And I tell you, old man, it was the very roots of him. It was his creed, it was his religion, it was his composition; it was the whole nature and basis and foundation of the man as it had been storing up within him all his life, ever since he was the rummy, thoughtful sort of beggar he used to be as a kid at old Wickamote's thirty years ago. It got me, I can tell you. It made me feel funny. Yes, and the next thing he went on to was equally the blood and bones of him. In a way even more characteristic. He said, 'Mind you, Hapgood, I don't blame my wife that all this had no effect on her. I don't blame her in the least, and I never lost my temper or got angry over the business. I see her point of view absolutely. And I see absolutely the point of view of the girl's father and of every one else who's willing to take in the girl but insists she must give up the baby. I see their point of view and understand it as plain as I see and understand that calendar hanging on the wall. I see it perfectly,' and he laughed in a whimsical sort of way and said, 'That's the devil of it.'

"Characteristic, eh? Wasn't that just exactly old Sabre at school puzzling up his old nut and saying, 'Yes, but I see what he means'?

"Well, wait a bit. He came to that again afterwards. It seems that, if you please, the very next day the girl herself follows up her letter by walking into the house. Eh? Yes, you can well say 'By Jove.' In she walked, baby and all. She'd walked all the way from Tidborough, and G.o.d knows how far earlier in the day. Sabre said she was half dead. She'd been to her father's house, and her father, that terrific-looking old Moses coming down the mountain that I've described to you, had turned her out. He'd take her--he had cried over her, the poor crying creature said--if she'd send away her baby, also if she'd say who the father was, but she wouldn't. 'I can't let my little baby go,' she said. Sabre said it was awful, hearing her. And so he drove her out, the old Moses man did, and the poor soul tried around for a bit--no money--and then trailed out to them.

"Sabre wouldn't tell me all that happened between his wife and himself.

I gather that, in his quiet way, perfectly seeing his wife's point of view and genuinely deeply distressed at the frightful pitch things were coming to, in that sort of way he nevertheless got his back up against his sense of what he ought to do and said the girl was not to be sent away, that she was to stop.

"His wife said, 'You're determined?'

"He said, 'Mabel' (that's her name) 'Mabel, I'm desperately, poignantly sorry, but I'm absolutely determined.'

"She said, 'Very well. If she's going to be in the house, I'm going out of it. I'm going to my father's. Now. You'll not expect the servants to stay in the house while you've got this--this woman living with you--'

(Yes, she said that.) 'So I shall pay them up and send them off, _now_, before I go. Are you still determined?'

"The poor devil, standing there with his stick and his game leg, and his face working, said, 'Mabel, Mabel, believe me, it kills me to say it, but I am, absolutely. The girl's got no home. She only wants to keep her baby. She must stop.'

"His wife went off to the kitchen.

"Pretty fierce, eh?

"Sabre said he sat where she'd left him, in the morning room in a straight-backed chair, with his legs stuck out in front of him, wrestling with it--like h.e.l.l. The girl was in the dining room. His wife and the servants were plunging about overhead.

"In about two hours his wife came back dressed to go. She said, 'I've packed my boxes. I shall send for them. The maids have packed theirs and they will send. I've sent them on to the station in front of me. There's only one more thing I want to say to you. You say this woman--' ('This woman, you know!' old Sabre said when he was telling me.) 'You say this woman has a claim on us?'

"He began, 'Mabel, I do. I--'

"She said, 'Do you want my answer to that? My answer is that perhaps she has a claim on _you!_'

"And she went."

III

"Well, there you are, old man. There it is. That's the story. That's the end. That's the end of my story, but what the end of the story as Sabre's living it is going to be, takes--well, it lets in some pretty wide guessing. There he is, and there's the girl, and there's the baby; and he's what he says he is--what I told you: a social outcast, beyond the pale, ostracized, excommunicated. No one will have anything to do with him. They've cleared him out of the office, or as good as done so.

He says the man Twyning worked that. The man Twyning--that Judas Iscariot chap, you remember--is very thick with old Bright, the girl's father. Old Bright pretty naturally thinks his daughter has gone back to the man who is responsible for her ruin, and this Twyning person--who's a partner, by the way--wrote to Sabre and told him that, although he personally didn't believe it--'not for a moment, old man,' he wrote--still Sabre would appreciate the horrible scandal that had arisen, and would appreciate the fact that such a scandal could not be permitted in a firm like theirs with its high and holy Church connections. And so on. He said that he and Fortune had given the position their most earnest and sympathetic thought and prayers--and prayers, mark you--and that they'd come to the conclusion that the best thing to be done was for Sabre to resign.

"Sabre says he was knocked pretty well silly by this step. He says it was his first realisation of the att.i.tude that everybody was going to take up against him. He went off down and saw them, and you can imagine there was a bit of a scene. He said he was dashed if he'd resign. Why on earth should he resign? Was he to resign because he was doing in common humanity what no one else had the common humanity to do? That sort of thing. You can imagine it didn't cut much ice with that crowd. The upshot of it was that Twyning, speaking for the firm, and calling him about a thousand old mans and that sort of slush, told him that the position would be reconsidered when he ceased to have the girl in his house and that, in the interests of the firm, until he did that he must cease to attend the office.

"And then old Sabre said he began to find himself in exactly the same position with every one. Every door closed to him. No one having anything to do with him. Even an old chap next door, a particular friend of his called Fungus or Fargus or some such name--even this old bird's house and his society is forbidden him. Sabre says old Fungus, or whatever his name is, is all right, but it appears he's ruled by about two dozen ramping great daughters, and they won't let their father have anything to do with Sabre. No, he's shut right out, everywhere.

"And Sabre, mind you--this is Sabre's extraordinary point of view: he's not a bit furious with all these people. He's feeling his position most frightfully; it's eating the very heart out of him, but he's working up not the least trace of bitterness over it. He says they're all supporting an absolutely right and just convention, and that it's not their fault if the convention is so hideously cruel in its application.

He says the absolute justice and the frightful cruelty of conventions has always interested him, and that he remembers once putting up to a great friend of his as an example this very instance of society's att.i.tude towards an unmarried girl who gets into trouble,--never dreaming that one day he was going to find himself up against the full force of it. He said, 'If this poor girl, if any girl, didn't find the world against her and every door closed to her, just look where you'd be, Hapgood. You'd have morality absolutely gone by the h.o.a.rd. No, all these people are right, absolutely right--and all conventions are absolutely right--in their principle; it's their practice that's sometimes so terrible. And when it is, how can you turn round and rage?

I can't.'

"Well, I said to him what I say to you, old man. I said, 'Yes, that's all right, Sabre. That's true, though there're precious few would take it as moderately as you; but look here, where's this going to end?

Where's it going to land you? It's landed you pretty fiercely as it is.

Have you thought what it may develop into? What are you doing about it?'

"He said he was writing round, writing to advertisers and to societies and places, to find a place where the girl would be taken in to work and allowed to have her baby with her. He said there must be hundreds of kind-hearted people about the place who would do it; it was only a question of finding them. Well, as to that, kind hearts are more than coronets and all that kind of thing, but it strikes me they're a jolly side harder than coronets to find when it comes to a question of an unmarried mother _and_ her baby, _and_ when the kind hearts, being found, come to make inquiries and find that the person making application on the girl's behalf is the man she's apparently living with, _and_ the man with Sabre's extraordinary record in regard to the girl. I didn't say that to poor old Sabre. I hadn't the face to. But I say it to you. You're no doubt thinking it for yourself. All that chain of circ.u.mstances, eh? Went out of his way to get her her first job. Got her into his house. In a way responsible for her getting the sack. Child born just about when it must have been born after she'd been sacked.

Girl coming to him for help. Writing to his wife, 'If only you knew the truth.' Wife leaving him. Eh? It's pretty fierce, isn't it? And I don't believe he's got an idea of it. I don't believe he realises for a moment what an extraordinary coil it all is. G.o.d help him if he ever does....

He'll want it.

"No, I didn't say a word like that to him. I couldn't. The nearest I got to it was I said, 'Well, but time's getting on, you know, old man. It's a--a funny position on the face of it. What do you suppose your wife's thinking all this time?'

"He said his wife would be absolutely all right once he'd found a home for the girl and sent her away. He said his wife was always a bit sharp in her views of things, but that she'd be all right when it was all over.

"I said, 'H'm. Heard from her?'

"He had--once. He showed me the letter. Well, you know, old man, every fox knows what foxes smell like; and I smelt a dear brother solicitor's smell in that letter. Smelt it strong. Asking him to make a home possible for her to return to so they might resume their life together.

I recognised it. I've dictated dozens.

"I handed it back. I said, 'H'm' again. I said, 'H'm, you remember, old man, there was that remark of hers just as she was leaving you--that remark that perhaps the girl might have a claim on you. Remember that, don't you?'

"By Jove, I thought for a minute he was going to flare up and let me have it. But he laughed instead. Laughed as if I was a fool and said, 'Oh, good Lord, man, that's utterly ridiculous. That was only just my wife's way. My wife's got plenty of faults to find with me--but that kind of thing! Man alive, with all my faults, my wife knows me.'

"Perhaps--I say, my holy aunt, it's nearly two o'clock! Come on, I'm for bed. Perhaps his wife does know him. What I'm thinking is, does he know his wife? I'm a solicitor. I know what I'd say if she came to me."

CHAPTER III